Martha Nussbaum
December 1st, 2008 | by Matthew Smith |Here’s a fun game. You have to come up with a short list of principles on which you would base a society. Then you must pretend to die and at the role of a dice you are reincarnated as someone in the society you imagined. You could be the poorest of the lowest class or the richest most well bred person. You could be sick or healthy, smart or stupid etc… The game progresses as the other players use your principles to decide how your life will look.
This game comes from Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Witch of Exmoor and is called ‘the veil of ignorance’. The game was used on a recent episode of the Philosopher’s Zone to introduce a discussion on Justice and Society with Martha Nussbaum who has written a book about it.
From the Philosopher’s Zone Transcript:
...it’s not enough to compare the opportunities that the people have in one society with what they have in another. We also want to say that a minimally decent society will give to all of its citizens, a certain threshold level of ten central capabilities. And then I go on to spell them out in a very general form, and I think of them as a kind of set of constitutional entitlements that whether there’s a written constitution or not, we could understand to be fundamental to the idea of minimal social justice in society. (Martha Nussbaum)
I thought about this discussion in terms of our own Australian society and how we always have people saying “those jobless people can get a job anytime, they just need to go back to school” but don’t account for other factors in these people’s lives that prevent them from doing so even if it’s just inertia. Nussbaum’s approach is not just about what people can theoretically do but what they can realistically access from society.
She talks about how in government we seem to focus on getting good and fair procedures or laws made and don’t think enough about the actual outcomes:
Well I want to say that the Rawlsean approach just says Well let’s figure out what a good-looking pasta machine would be, and let’s just define good pasta is whatever it is that comes out from that good-looking machine, and of course in real life you never do that, you design the machine in order to get the result that you independently think is a good pasta.
Just thought I’d throw these notes up so I can keep them in mind.